As you can no doubt decipher from the title i am looking to overclock my radeon8500. I am wondering what the best (read: safest) method to accomplish this is and also what i should do to combat heat (if that will be a problem). Also, if anyone has successfully oveclocked their 8500, please post your results to give me a rough idea of what i stand to gain. Thanks.

Download something like Powerstrip, overclock in small increments, and keep testing. You probably won't fry anything if you go one step at a time.

As for better cooling, it may or may not help, depends largely on the properties of the RAM and GPU. Better cooling certainly won't hurt, but I'm unsure if you'll see much benefit from it with just video card cooling, especially for memory which tends to be the bottleneck.